A professor has calculated how much blowing up the Death Star in 'Star Wars' would set back gross galactic product

Major geopolitical events have often been followed by
volatility in the economy and financial markets.

World War II helped to shake the US out of the Great Depression.
The Civil War set the economy of the Southern US back
for generations.

Now you can add to those annals of financial
catastrophes the Rebel Alliance's destruction of the
Galactic Empire's Death Star.

Zachary Feinstein, a professor at Washington University in St.
Louis, published
a study of the financial impact of the events in the Star
Wars films on the economy of the fictional galaxy.

With tongue almost certainly in cheek, Feinstein wrote the
paper exactly as you would any other academic finding.

"In this paper we study the financial repercussions of the
destruction of two fully armed and operational moon-sized battle
stations (“Death Stars”) in a 4-year period and the dissolution
of the galactic government in Star Wars," began the abstract of
the study.

"The emphasis of this work is to calibrate and simulate a model
of the banking and financial systems within the galaxy. Along
these lines, we measure the level of systemic risk that may have
been generated by the death of Emperor Palpatine and the
destruction of the second Death Star."

With full on footnotes and in-text citations to "Lucas" and
"Kershner" (the screenwriters of Star Wars, George and Irvin
respectively), Feinstein found that the destruction of the Death
Stars and collapse of the Galactic Empire would throw the
galactic economy into chaos.

"In this case study we found that the Rebel Alliance would need
to prepare a bailout of at least 15%, and likely at least 20%, of
[Gross Galactic Product] in order to mitigate the
systemic risks and the sudden and catastrophic economic
collapse," said the study. "Without such funds at the ready, it
likely the Galactic economy would enter an economic depression of
astronomical proportions."

The scale of the Galactic economy, as modeled by Feinstein, is
massive. Average Gross Galactic Product, similar to our
GDP, during the 20 year reign of the Empire is around $4.6
sextillion a year. For reference, a sextillion is a 1 followed
by 21 zeros (in the US) and 59 million times the
Earth's 2014
GDP.

Feinstein estimates that based on the cost of building the Death
Stars, loans from the Galactic Banking system and a fiscally
conservative Emperor, the government would default on $515.5
quintillion (1 and 18 zeroes in the US) in bonds.

This would then cause the galactic banking system to collapse,
necessitating a bailout as over 1,700 banks would be "too big to
fail."

As mentioned by Feinstein, this would again be a problem as the
central government structure would most likely collapse after the
death of the Emperor and the "scrappy underdogs", as Feinstein
says, of the Rebel Alliance would be unlikely to pick up the
slack.

Based on all of this analysis, maybe we should have been rooting
for Darth Vader after all.